The video is a cinematic from the game - Marvel Ultimate Alliance and features Captain America, Wolverine, Spider Man and The Thor. Some amazing 3D going on here!

The Indian Rupee has made some staggering progress against the U.S Dollar in the past couple of years. This has happened mainly due to bad performance of the latter. I guess most Indian’s would rejoice at such news. It could only mean good things right ? Not quite if you are a IT professional. According to a news article on the Times of India it is going to be tough to get a job.

“IT recruitment firms say hiring across the board has gone down by 5% in the last two months. Most of them are now resorting to ‘just in time hiring’.” - Strong Re slows down hiring in IT, Times of India.

But something is wrong isn’t it ? I mean why would a strengthening currency have a negative effect on IT companies ? I have one word for you! Outsourcing. This seems like a wake up call to all the big IT firms in India. If firms in the United States of America stop sending their projects to India then from where will the income for these IT firms come from ? How many other countries are willing to outsource their IT requirements to India ? I don’t think too many. It is a shame really. I remember reading news of Indian IT companies taking over the world and IT companies in India being some of the best in the world. All of it collapses as soon as one country starts reducing the amount of projects they send out. Now this reduction has not been reported as such. But reports of a gradual reduction in hiring of software professionals reflects somehow that things are not as rosy as they might seem. It’s hard to tell though from just a few percentage figures.

So what’s the big deal if outsourcing starts coming to a halt ? The large amounts of profits which these IT companies report every quarter must have been used for sustaining themselves. Right ? No. At least I do not think so. This is where I feel the mighty IT companies of India have made a mistake. I cannot understand why it is that these large companies cannot develop a software product that they can market all over the world. Why can’t we have a Google or a Microsoft or an IBM right here in India ? Why can’t these large firms transform themselves into a product company and not just be a selling ground of relatively cheap labour. I don’t know why and I really have no clue as to how this problem can be solved. But maybe it is not a problem. Maybe India is destined to be a outsourcing hub. Maybe doing monkey coding for software architects in the USA is all that Indian developers can achieve. But I don’t think that’s true. An example of an Indian participating in the development of a product has to be Sabeer Bhatia, co founder of Hotmail, later bought by Microsoft for $400 million. But these large companies are only interested in making a profit. An article on Rediff written in around 2004 I think still holds true. Maybe less so now then 3 years ago but it does still hold true. Here are some excerpts from the article in which the author compares companies from Silicon Valley(USA) to the IT companies of Bangalore (referred to as Coolie Valley companies in the article)-

“Silicon Valley companies invest huge sums of money on R&D. They generate new ideas and are constantly developing new ways of doing things.

Coolie Valley companies have nothing called R&D. They do not generate any new ideas.

A typical Silicon Valley engineer is a specialist in a particular technology, like inkjet printing or virus detection. He spends all his life working in this technology area.

A typical Coolie Valley engineer is a specialist in a few languages. He is not concerned about the technology that he is working on and is willing to develop any software with the languages that he knows.

Silicon Valley is all about the excitement of creating things out of nothing. Companies like HP actually started in the garages of their founders.

Coolie Valley does not know the meaning of creativity. Some companies are started by people who quit other companies and take some of the parent firm’s software development contracts with them.

It is extremely presumptuous to compare Bangalore with Silicon Valley, so all you Bangaloreans, please do me a favour and

• Don’t call your city Silicon Valley (’pub city’ or ‘garden city’, I have no problem with — lots of pubs and lots of trees, but very little silicon).
• Don’t call one of your new software companies a ‘high technology start-up.’
• Don’t call your engineers ‘techies.’ They’ve forgotten their engineering long ago.
• Don’t say you’ve invested in ‘tech stocks’ (’body stocks’ maybe ?).

If you are from Delhi or Mumbai and encounter a Bangalorean ‘techie’ spouting off about his work or about his Silicon Valley, you no longer need to develop an inferiority complex.” - Bangalore : Silicon Valley or Coolie Valley, Rediff.com

Now I may not be the best person to write about something so complicated. I maybe completely wrong. Maybe Infosys or Wipro are secretly working on something big in their huge complexes. Or maybe this reduction in hiring and a possible reduction in outsourcing is just blown out of proportion. But either way I just hope that one of the software bahemoths decides to launch a software product of somekind that people all over the world use. That will be really pleasing to hear in contrast to things like -

“But ever since everybody in North America cheaped out and started sending all the work to India the mailing lists of every major product have been polluted with the Sanjays and Prashants of this world asking questions that make me wonder why the hell we’re sending out our prized projects to these seemingly incompetent people.” - Indian outsourcing is killing IT, Arsenalist.

Alright so I slipped in a quote from a blog post but please do read the comments that post has received. In the end all I want to say is that by no means should this blog post be thought of as an attack against the IT companies of India or Indian software professionals. They have done an amazing job. But I just feel that some of them have to take the next step and start developing products that can be marketed all over the world. World domination should be a realistic target.

Addendum : Infosys has announced that it will lower it’s dependence on US customers through faster growth in other markets. (via Times Of India)

Mozilla Firefox is my favorite web browser for all it’s features and support for standards. And recently due to very poor Internet speeds I stumbled upon a feature I never knew existed. I was looking for the option to stop images from loading to increase the page loading speeds. I decided to look through all the tabs and check out all the options. I found this feature in the advanced tab - “Search for text when I start typing”.

I never knew this could be done in Firefox! In fact I don’t really know if this is a new feature in Firefox 2 or if it has been there in previous releases. But I love the ability to begin a search by just typing. Apparently enabling this feature enables the quick find bar - again something I didn’t know existed. I usually searched by hitting F3 and typing whatever I was looking for. Now it’s much easier because while browsing the page you just type whatever you are looking for to find it on the page! But there are a couple downsides to this feature of course. Web services like Bloglines and Gmail for example have keyboard shortcuts that you could inadvertently activate while trying to find something. Also the quick find bar disappears after 5 seconds which could be less according to some. To change the amount of time it remains active just type about:config in location bar and type find the in the filter input box. Change the accessibility.typeaheadfind.timeout by right clicking on it and selecting modify to whatever you wish. Remember that 1000 ms is equal to 1 second.

In the past couple of weeks I started noticing a real slowdown in traffic to my blog. I used to get quite a few visitors via search engines especially Google. I thought maybe my erratic posting schedule may have deterred some of the visitors. But why has traffic from search engine referrals gone so low I wondered. So I decided to Google my site for some keywords (like my name). And to my surprise my site didn’t show up at all! Not even when I Googled for ‘visualreactor’ - and that was scary! I remembered signing up for Google Webmaster tools and sought help from there. Apparently Google bot last crawled my site on 7th July. No problems there - but it also said that my site had been blocked from the Google index because it violated certain web master guidelines. I had no idea what that meant but Google’s web master help center had an answer to this sort of problem. And it read as follows -

Your page has been blocked from our index because it does not meet the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We cannot comment on the individual reasons your page was removed. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index. Please read our webmaster guidelines for more information.

Once you have modified your site so that it meets our guidelines, you can submit your site for reconsideration.

What struck me odd was that apparently Google (bot) thinks that I have used cloaking or set up links for fooling search engines. But I have done no such thing! In fact I have not made any changes to my blog for a long time now. This is really a big surprise to me because I never expected to be blamed for anything like this. I don’t even have any advertisements on my blog so why would I do anything like that ? If anybody has any idea as to what has happened please do tell me!

For those who have been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks there is a new web 2.0 startup that has been unleashed upon you. So what’s new you ask ? Well it has the backing of Kevin Rose, the creator of the ever popular Digg. The name of the this new beast is Pownce. Yes. You can finally tell your girlfriend that you are going to Pownce her. Anyhow Pounce is like a more powerful instant messenger. Basically it allows you to send a message to any of your friends. Pownce also lets you send files to your friends. But the new twist is that you can form groups and send messages or files to all those belonging to a particular group! Now that’s something many people have been waiting for ever since the birth of the Internet!

Well not really, because we already had FTP, instant messengers, chat and recently Twitter. But none of them offered an integrated solution for sending your dear messages and files to groups of friends or associates. What if you wanted to send a song to just 10 friends from your list of 50 friends. Using any of the above services would require some work. Well for the lazy people now there is Pownce. The dwellers of the world wide web have reacted all very differently to this new service though. Some have like it, some hate it and some don’t really care.  I personally think that it is going to be a hit. It could even be popular in India if it could just catch on. In my opinion Pownce takes one of the main reasons (messaging) why Orkut is popular in India and puts it in a prettier package. So what’s not to like ? Well the problem is that almost every Indian is on Orkut and it will take some doing to get people to sign up for Pownce.

Nationality no bar - I have 6 invites left to give out. At the time of writing this post, Pownce is still in invites only sign up mode and so you need an invite to get in. So leave a comment if you need an invite. And also the Pownce blog tells that the invite mails mysteriously find their way into the invitees spam box so if that happens I can mail you the invitation code which you can use to sign-up. Cheers.

This is my Windows XP desktop for the month of July. The wallpaper is from the Desktopography collection and is made by Pete Harrison. In case you’re wondering why the wallpaper looks so distorted - It’s because I am running Windows Media Player 11 with a transparency setting of around 80%. I am pretty much using the computer to listen to music these days and leaving the desktop like this makes it look really cool. I can’t show the visualization actually moving around in the screenshot but it looks fantastic in real life. I am still using BBlean as the core and Launchy for all my application launching requirements. The color style for BBlean is “Soto” by thewayofzen. Okay so I am off to listen to some more music.

After a long break from blogging I am finally back! It has been 46 days since my last post. I have to be honest though. Semester exams were not the main reason why I haven’t posted to my blog for a long time now. Exams are almost over. One more exam and it’s 20 days of holidays! Anyway the main reason for my absence was that I didn’t know what to write to my blog. I guess this long break from blogging has done me some good though. I have some ideas for my blog which I will explore in the holidays. Although I have been pondering a redesign of my blog but I just haven’t gone about it yet. I guess you grow tired of the layout and the look of your blog after some time but I can’t seem to think of anything else. So for now at least this layout stays but some possible realignments are in the order.

Besides blogging, surfing the net and playing a couple of computer games I probably won’t be upto much in the holidays. I originally had thought about learning Python and implementing my own blogging engine using the Django framework. I mainly got the inspiration to do so from avalonstar’s rebirth. But I have decided against that now. So do you have any ideas for visualreactor ?

Yes. It’s that time of the semester again. Exams are looming around the corner and no sincere preparations have begun yet. I guess it’s just about the right time to say that I won’t be publishing too many posts in the next couple of weeks. And I hear you scream - “But you don’t write a lot anyways! So WTF are you yapping about o_0 ?” or something to that effect. Well I know I don’t but I do have some nice plans for my blog. Actually what I really want is to integrate the blog into an old school personal site with a small ever-growing portfolio. I also want to improve my writing skills because frankly speaking they suck!I guess that will have to wait for a while though. Oh yeah I really like that song (see embedded video) by the way!

Manchester United have been crowned the premiership champions for a record 9 times under the leadership of Sir Alex Ferguson. As Chelsea failed to defeat Arsenal the difference between Chelsea and Man Utd is 7 points with two games remaining. Although it has to be said that Chelsea gave a real tough fight right up till the end - the best team won! I have been waiting for the past 3 years and it has finally happened! Although I really have to get to studying because I have an exam tomorrow!

Manchester United have scored 83 goals this season with 20 different goal scorers. Utd have led the premiership since October 31 2006 and were second only in September 2006. BBC has a wonderful little piece on ‘How the title was won‘ and you can find more statistics of Man Utd season at F365.

Update : We are the champions - A nice video found on youtube.

Mmmmm. So tasty isn’t it ? Well that’s what some really creative people can do even with coffee. Click on the above image to see a set of images on Flickr and be amazed with all the beautiful designs. I wish I had one of those right now!